A lot of people think of connectivity in their products as an opportunity to make things more efficient. That’s a primary reason that Ventana Medical systems added connectivity to one of its products in 2006. The idea was to use a wired connection in the machine to tell hospitals if the machine was working or not, so Ventana could guarantee certain levels of service. But several years alter connectivity has changed the company’s business.

In this week’s podcast I interview Sean Casey, director of information technology at Ventana Medical Systems to see what his company has learned from its experience with connectivity. We discuss how it’s building new products based on what it has learned and how it’s using data to predict failures before they happen. This week also has Kevin Tofel and I talking about connected home security cameras and how to build a roving security robot on the (relatively) cheap.